developed almost at once into a kind of combat.  Lottie had been the only child of headstrong, well-to-do parents.  He also had been the only child of his widowed mother.  Well then, both he and Lottie had been brought up to consider themselves the first in whatsoever company they found themselves.  During the early months of the marriage he had, of course, continued the spoiling of the young wife.  But this never altered the fact that, by his very nature, he considered himself as first and almost as single in any relationship.  First and single he felt, and as such he bore himself.  It had taken him years to realise that Lottie also felt herself first and single:  under all her whimsicalness and fretfulness was a conviction as firm as steel:  that she, as woman, was the centre of creation, the man was but an adjunct.  She, as woman, and particularly as mother, was the first great source of life and being, and also of culture.  The man was but the instrument and the finisher.  She was the source and the substance.

Sure enough, Lottie had never formulated this belief inside herself.  But it was formulated for her in the whole world.  It is the substantial and professed belief of the whole white world.  She did but inevitably represent what the whole world around her asserted:  the life-centrality of woman.  Woman, the life-bearer, the life-source.

Nearly all men agree to the assertion.  Practically all men, even while demanding their selfish rights as superior males, tacitly agree to the fact of the sacred life-bearing priority of woman.  Tacitly, they yield the worship to that which is female.  Tacitly, they conspire to agree that all that is productive, all that is fine and sensitive and most essentially noble, is woman.  This, in their productive and religious souls, they believe.  And however much they may react against the belief, loathing their women, running to prostitutes, or beer or anything, out of reaction against this great and ignominious dogma of the sacred priority of women, still they do but profane the god they worship.  Profaning woman, they still inversely worship her.

But in Aaron was planted another seed.  He did not know it.  He started off on the good old tack of worshipping his woman while his heart was honest, and profaning her in his fits of temper and revolt.  But he made a bad show.  Born in him was a spirit which could not worship woman:  no, and would not.  Could not and would not.  It was not in him.  In early days, he tried to pretend it was in him.  But through his plaintive and homage-rendering love of a young husband was always, for the woman, discernible the arrogance of self-unyielding male.  He never yielded himself:  never.  All his mad loving was only an effort.  Afterwards, he was as devilishly unyielded as ever.  And it was an instinct in her, that her man must yield to her, so that she should envelop him yielding, in her all-beneficent love.  She was quite sure that